by Lowry, Chris
It’s where the memories stay, and random snippets of cowboy movies played out thanks to my monkey mind’s thought bubble about steel horses, which led to a Bon Jovi song playing over and over until it was usurped by Toby Keith. Then titles of movies, and bits of dialogue.
“Reap the whirlwind.”
“I’ll be your huckleberry.”
“I did bad things boss, and I don’t like to think on them.”
Which made me miss the actors I once loved, and hoped some of them made it. Kevin Costner took the mantle of cowboy movies and did a damn fine job, and I listened to an interview with him once where he talked about how hard he worked his ranch. He could have survived if he prepped it.
I watched his movies with my son, trying to instil in him a love of Westerns. I wasn’t sure it worked, but I planned to ask him.
That thought sent me on playing out different plans on how to find them, how the reunion would go, what excuses I would make for being late.
Which carried me to the outskirts of Southaven Mississippi, a suburb just before the state line and Memphis city limits.
I pulled off to pour gas into the tank, shook out some of the dead legs caused by vibration and decided to move West over to 61, the old blues highway and come in from that direction.
The interstate through the magnolia state had been empty, but the closer I got to Memphis, the more shells, abandoned cars, and small jams I saw. The road south from the city glittered like pieces of candy as sunshine bounced off windshields of stalled automobiles.
I assumed it would get worse, so took the rural two lane west.
I thought it was a good decision, and was congratulating myself as I turned north puttered up 61, and tried to decide if the 55 bridge or the I-40 Bridge was the best choice to cross the Mississippi.
Then I remembered the old railway trestle had been turned into a bike path that not only crossed the river, but ran through twenty miles of Arkansas and spilled out in a trailhead outside of West Memphis.
The eight-foot-wide trail would be all blacktop so the motorcycle could make it. There would be no cars to block the way through mostly wooded areas and progress would move unimpeded.
I twisted the throttle, jumped back up to fifty. Now that I had a plan it was just a matter of making it happen.
It took twenty minutes to navigate through town and see the two bridges lined up from the old steel museum on the bluff. From up there the pedestrian bridge looked clear while 55 was a parking lot.
I congratulated myself on a good decision as I raced down the hill toward the bridge.
I didn’t hear the shot that took out the engine.
One minute it was whining, if not quite cranked into the red, a steady rumble roar that dulled the sense. The next minute it stalled, coughed and the pistons locked.
I fought a wobble as it slid to a stop, and that’s when I heard him.
“Nice of you to finally show up.”
The bastard was in a wheelchair made from a bobcat loader. One of the small one’s used by landscapers in tight spaces, little more than a seat on treads with detachable blades that can be changed out.
He was strapped to the seat with a rifle in his lap and a line of his soldiers stepping out across the road to block the way.
How the hell had he found me?
“I bet you’re wondering how I found you,” he grinned and used the joystick to wheel forward.
His squad lock stepped behind him.
Son of a beach was psychic too. Did the fall give him new powers when I tipped him off a building in Alabama?
“You’re building quite a reputation for yourself, Dad.”
He grinned again.
I yanked the pistol, sent three shots his way and dropped the bike. One pinged off the cage around his bobcat but he didn’t flinch.
I'd be impressed with the bastard if I didn't want to kill him so badly.
I lifted the rifle and sent a shot in his direction as fast as I could pull the trigger.
His men began returning fire.
Automatic weapons versus my seven shot Winchester.
It was no contest.
I started dodging toward some cover, somewhere back the way I came.
Except it was all uphill. Not even a decent bush to crouch behind. I bolted right and headed toward the river.
A baseball bat hit me in the back.
Or at least that’s what it felt like.
I tumbled down the riverbank ass over elbows and slammed into the bridge footing. Bullets chewed into the concrete, dust and chips filling the air like snowflakes.
I crawled behind the concrete edge of the bridge as their bullets chewed away at my hiding place, and slithered out of the backpack. No hole all the way through. The cans, the padding had stopped the bullet, but left me with a bruise that was going to hurt for days.
If I lasted that long.
Their guns went silent after a moment, just the memory of their echoes and a cloud of gritty dust floating off in the wind.
"You want to give up," the General cackled. "Or us come in after you?"
They had the high ground. I remembered that lesson from one of the Star Wars movies. I've got the high ground Anakin.
I did not feel like pulling a Darth Vader, because frankly, I was already so close to the dark side Vader would be like, "Damn, that's an evil mofo."
So, I did as many men who had come before me had done and looked to the river for an escape. The brown muddy water was full of debris and muck from floods further north. It roiled and rolled against the black mud shore and shot downriver at twenty miles an hour or more. If I had a boat it'd be perfect. I could wallow off in the water and duck down as they tried to shoot the bobbing craft.
"My kingdom for a boat," I muttered.
There was the crack of a branch to the right of me and I aimed at the thick bushes and sent a shot into them.
It looked like the General got tired of waiting and was sending his boys to flank me. Which meant there would be another on my left, so I sent my last bullet that way and didn't let them hear me cuss when I ran dry.
I dropped the gun and ran for the water.
In the movies, it would have been a perfect dive, judges holding up ten cards as I knifed into the water and held my breath to swim far out of range into the middle of the river.
I'm not that graceful or lucky.
I took three steps into the muck before my boot got stuck and I tripped face first into the stinking mud. A bullet splatted next to me and I did my best belly crawl the last ten feet and spluttered into the water. Bullets churned up the ground and waves around me, and planted itself firmly in my ass, a million-dollar wound according to the Army. It burned in the nasty water. I dragged myself along the bottom as far as I could go and bobbed up to turn back to shore.
Seven soldiers lined the shoreline drawing beads on my bobbing head, and I could see them grinning. I didn't get a chance to see the General or the look of victory on his face as something plowed into the back of my skull and sent me under.
I came up sputtering next to a driftwood log, and grabbed on the backside of it, putting the log between the soldier's and my head.
Bullets chunked into the wet wood with a scratching plop and hit the water around me as I drifted out and away fast.
I could hear the General shrieking but couldn't make out his words as the log carried me along the river and Memphis rapidly shrank on the horizon.
CHAPTER TWO
I don't know how long I was in the water. I held onto the log until I couldn't feel my legs from the numbing cold, and when my hands began to slip off the water soaked log, I wrapped my arms around it tight and did my best imitation of a kick to reach the shore.
I should have gone for the Arkansas side, but the Mississippi side was closer and I wasn't sure I could make it all the way across.
There was a monument on the riverfront in Memphis to a man who rowed out in a shallow boat to save dozens of passengers from a sinking steamboat, and lost is life
in the process.
I could have used his help as the cold sapped my strength and energy. I could feel sleep stealing up on me, and knew that if I closed my eyes, I'd drown.
But then my feet hit something and I began to stumble up onto a sandbar as the force of the water rushed me higher. Then I was on my knees and crawling out until I was on a high portion of the mud outcropping.
I felt like laying down and sleeping then, but some primitive part of my brain must have still been working because I shoved up and crawled on hands and knees until I reached the brush at the shoreline. I kept moving up, forcing aside the kudzu planted there to prevent erosion, and crawling all the way to the top of the riverbank, twenty or thirty feet above the water.
Luck was with me then, because if the crumbling shore had given way and sent me back down, I don't know if I would have made it up again.
I rested at the top for a few moments that stretched into thirty minutes and must have napped because I jumped awake with a shock. I was too exposed out here, ready prey for any Z that wandered up.
I reached around and felt my backside to check on the bullet wound there. My numb fingers didn’t go into any holes, but there was a long bloody gash that split the skin open. I’d need to pack it and give it some attention later, but I didn’t have lead rattling around in my bottom, so that was a plus.
I moved into a squat and stood up, let the dizziness wash over me and threw up what felt like a gallon of river water, still brown and dirty. It left an oily taste in my mouth and that made me throw up again.
Just marking my territory.
But after the second round of vomiting, I felt a little better and stumbled through the woods away from the water.
The General and his men would be looking for me, and checking downriver, and if they had set a trap for me in Memphis, then he would assume I'd head for the next bridge in Greenville.
I had to figure out how he knew I was going to Arkansas though, and how he knew to lay in wait on the 55 Junction.
I'd need food so I could think clearly, and a weapon to replace the one I lost. Weapon. Food. Shelter.
It was like a damn mantra in the post Z world. Food could come before weapon, but those were priorities.
I kept limping through the woods, using the trees for balance. My wet clothes were making me shiver and I added fire to the list of things I wanted. I wanted it before food, and before a weapon, but that was just the spoiled civilized part of me trying to complain.
Pain was inevitable.
Suffering optional.
I had run a couple of hundred-mile ultramarathon's each year before the Z apocalypse. They were an exercise in distraction, a meditation in pain management. One was in Chattanooga TN on a New Year's Day one year. The day started out clear and cold, and rapidly devolved into thunderstorms that soaked everyone to the skin, and turned three miles of the course into a slog through a flood swollen creek. The drop in temperatures made hypothermia a foregone conclusion for everyone, and hot soup at the aid stations a necessary survival tool.
But it was cold between aid stations. Wet cold that coated sore muscles and leeched into the bones so that you were left to wonder if there was ever such a thing as warmth, or if you would ever have that feeling again.
I felt like that now.
I couldn't feel my toes, or feet, just numb slabs of meat I kept propelling forward. My fingers were curled into fists, unable to move from the claw like pose locked in the joints. My hips ached, but at least they had feeling. Everything else just was numb, so numb even the shivering had stopped.
I kept moving forward, head almost down and knew I was going to be in trouble if I didn't find something soon.
And then I did.
A fishing trailer set back from a cleared acre to the shore. Empty. Boarded up, so it might be abandoned.
It was a single wide model from the 70's, covered in black grime from years of exposure, an empty wooden carport at one end of the porch. There was a boat under a second carport, a fourteen-foot metal long john with expired registration from a year ago.
So, it wasn't completely abandoned, just unused before the Zombies hit, and not since then.
I sent up another silent prayer and angled my stumble toward the front door. I almost didn't see the Z.
It came around the edge of the trailer and lurched straight at me, almost a mimic of my lurch toward it.
I moaned.
It moaned.
Then we collided and fell together, it's jaws snapping for my neck and face, my clawed hands shoving back against its chin, fingers just millimetres away from its slavering teeth.
Hands grabbed at the wet clothes and tried to dig through the swollen canvas material. I struggled to move, to get on top, to roll over and away, but my slow brain couldn't get my slower muscles to respond.
The Z pressed closer.
I shoved my clawed fist into its chin and pushed. I pushed until it's head bowed back from the taut rotten cords in its neck and I shoved even harder, until something cracked and it stopped chomping, stopped biting and I kept pushing until the head popped off and warm goo sprayed over my hands.
Then I rolled over, dry heaved and tried to wipe off the gore in the black leaves.
I realized I was crying, wondered when that started and forced myself up to the trailer. There was a padlock on the door, and I lifted one of the cinderblocks being used as a step and used it to smash the lock open. It wasn't easy, it wasn't pretty and I dropped it twice in the attempt.
But finally, the door swung open, and even through my river water stuffed nose I could smell the Z stink on my hands and sleeves. I couldn't take that in the room with me, and suffer through it all night.
I turned and shuffled back toward the river, remembered to double check my surroundings for more Z only after I reached the water, but it was safe for the moment. I splashed the cold water over my hands and sleeves, removing as much of the gunk as I could and hustled back to the trailer as fast as I could.
Daylight was fading and I wanted to check it out before it got too dark.
There were mattresses inside in the three bedrooms, and water in the tanks on each toilet. There were stale clean towels in a linen closet, along with old blankets that looked like they were just waiting for the owners to show up for a long weekend of fishing.
No weapons except for a filet knife and fishing gear with a firestarter, and the cabinets were bare of food. Until I reached the one above the fridge.
I didn't hold out much hope because people don't keep food in that cabinet, not always or often. It was usually stuffed with appliances or dishes that were only used on special occasions.
But this fisherman's trailer had an unopened box of saltine crackers, three cans of carrots, two cans of peas and two cans of cranberry sauce. It was a veritable thanksgiving feast.
I piled it all in the living room, then stepped outside. There was an overturned metal pan, like an old-fashioned wash bucket next to the boat. I'd check out the boat in the morning when the sunlight would give me the best view.
Right now, I just moved the bucket into the middle of the living room floor, gathered a lot of wood from around the trailer and stacked it inside and beside the bucket.
I shut the door, blocked it with the overturned kitchen table and stripped off my clothes. I built a small blazing fire in the bucket and when I was warm, hung the clothes across the shower bar that I moved next to the fire.
I sat naked in front of the flames, and cooked the carrots and peas into a soup, drank it all, ate a package of saltines with a can of cranberry sauce, and wrapped myself in a nest of towels and blankets to sleep, filet knife close at hand.
CHAPTER THREE
The next morning, I overslept.
I know that sounds weird in a world where clocks had no meaning. But ever since the Zombie Armageddon happened, I'd been pretty in sync with the rising and setting of the sun, waking up when it was first light, and ready for bed not too long after dark.
Not today.
I opened my eyes to full sunshine leaking through the windows facing east. It must have been a little after mid-morning and I cursed quietly because that meant the General would have had a head start on searching for me.
If they ran across this fishing cabin, I was toast.
I checked the clothes and they were mostly dry and smelled like smoke. I guess that's what happens when you burn a fire inside a washtub in a trailer and hang your pants over the flames.
It made me think Cowboys must have stunk pretty bad, and then I realized most cowboys took a bath on Saturday unless they came across a river or stream, and even then, it was iffy. So, they must have smelled pretty much like homeless people all the time, except with manure and sweat and horse lather thrown in.
I took a second to appreciate the smell of only smoke and river water as I got dressed. I took the blankets from the nest and folded them in half, then slit a foot-long hole in the middle of that. I put my head through the hole and it made a blanket poncho. I did the same with two sheets tied them around my waist with a strip of towel like a belt. Now I had extra layers over my coat, and was prepared for any cold snaps that might happen if I was caught out without shelter.
Plus, I could fold my hands up inside the blanket as I walked and keep them warm. The temperatures were dropping into the forties at night, but never climbing out of the fifties during daylight.
The weather here was fickle. It could be seventy-one day and twenty the next and I wasn't enough of a weatherman to read the clouds.
Bundled up I slowly opened the door and stood back to one side, just in case anyone was lying in wait.
But no one was there. I stepped out into the world, slid the haft of the broken lock back into the clasp to keep the shelter intact in case someone needed it in the future, or if I came back this way with my kids, and went to investigate the boat.
A lot of fishermen store gear in their boats, but this was a weekend trailer in the woods and the boat was just a metal hull Sixteen feet, three unpadded seats, a rotten board on the gunwale where a motor could be mounted.
